Leafs forward Phil Kessel gets sandwiched between Hurricanes Joni Pitkanen, left, and Jamie McBain during Monday night's 4-1 loss to Carolina. Kessel has yet to score a goal this season but leads the NHL in shots with 42.

There was a catch, mind you: They had to spend it in Winnipeg, where Wednesday’s midday temperature was a brisk minus-15C.

To their coach, at least, the free day on the prairie was a treat. Carlyle, a sporting legend in these parts, spent some of Wednesday trolling fishing-tackle shops to get a look at the latest gear. When he played for the previous incarnation of the NHL Jets in the 1980s and ’90s, he kept a winter fishing hut on the Red River’s frozen crust about 40 minutes outside the city. The hut, emblazoned with his No. 8, was an athlete’s place to ponder the cosmos while dipping a line for bottom-dwelling greenback walleye.

Phil Kessel only wishes breaking the ice could be so simple. Actually, it should be. Heading into Wednesday night’s games there were 342 NHLers who had scored at least one goal this season. But Kessel, the Maple Leafs’ leading goal-scorer and point-getter since he joined the team in the fall of 2009, had yet to register a single measly goal.

Theories abound as to why. Perhaps he’s struggling to find the mesh because linemate Joffrey Lupul has been absent since Lupul took a Dion Phaneuf slapper off his forearm in the third game of the 10-game-old season. Lupul, who finished second behind Kessel on the team scoring chart last season, assisted on 17 of Kessel’s career-high 37 goals a year ago. Then again, centre Tyler Bozak was credited with an assist on 16 of Kessel’s goals a season ago, and both Bozak and Kessel have played all 10 of Toronto’s games so far.

And if it’s not Lupul’s absence, perhaps it’s Carlyle’s presence. Under ex-coach Ron Wilson, Kessel averaged .44 goals a game for most of the three seasons. Since Carlyle arrived with his defence-first thrust, Kessel has just five goals in 28 games — about .18 a game. In other words, small sample size acknowledged, No. 81 has been less than half the scorer under Carlyle that he was under Wilson.

On Wednesday, Carlyle spent considerable breath expounding on the ways in which Kessel has helped Toronto’s .500 cause without igniting a red light. He praised Kessel for putting in a two-assist, plus-3 performance against the Capitals. He praised Kessel for his contribution on the defensive end.

“He made some plays along the wall (in Washington) that historically some people would say he would never have made,” Carlyle marvelled. “But that’s a great sign for a coach.”

Carlyle was asked if it’s possible that all the energy Kessel is said to be expending on activities not related to scoring could be impeding his specialty. Kessel, after all, was a combined minus-38 in his previous three seasons in Toronto. After 10 games this year, he’s shooting even par in the plus-minus column. Has Carlyle turned him into too well-rounded a player?

“Well, I’ve been blamed for a lot of things. But that’s a new one . . . I would disagree with that 100 per cent,” said Carlyle. “What we’re looking for is we’re looking for us to provide an environment that’s a team environment versus separating individuals at this point.”

Fair enough. Certainly there appears to be a resounding amount of non-concern among Leafs management, mostly because Kessel, heading into Wednesday’s action, was leading the league in shots with 42 while racking up a long list of what Dave Poulin, the Toronto executive, called “Grade-A scoring chances.”

“I’d be concerned if he wasn’t getting chances — if he was going three or four games without a great scoring chance. He may have not gone a period without a great scoring chance,” said Poulin. “He is going to score his goals. It’s as simple as that. He is going to go on a great tear. They’re going to go in from the corner. They’re going to go in off somebody’s head. They’re going to go in in a variety of manners. Phil is too good a player with too rare an ability to score to not score. It’s as simple as that.”

History would suggest it is. Kessel has weathered longer goal-less streaks as a member of the Boston Bruins, including 15-gamers in each of his rookie and sophomore years. He’s gone as many as 14 games without a goal as a Leaf, this back in the early months of 2011.

And better scorers have gone through worse, according to numbers provided by the Elias Sports Bureau. Bryan Trottier once endured a 10-game goal-less streak and a 12-gamer in the same season in which he still managed 50 goals. Dave Andreychuk suffered through 10 straight games without scoring in 1992-93 and still got 54 goals for Buffalo and Toronto. Jarome Iginla slumped through a 10-game goal drought in 2007-08 and still scored 50.

“If he scores on half his chances, we wouldn’t be having the conversation,” Carlyle said. “He’d be leading our team, easily, in goals. But right now they’re not going in.”

The key, in angling for fish or for your season’s first, is patience. And if Kessel doesn’t have any luck netting the latter in Thursday night’s game against the Jets, the Leafs’ stay here will be lengthy enough to find some success at Carlyle’s wintertime pastime. The team isn’t scheduled to leave here until after a scheduled practice on Friday morning, after which they’ll hop a charter plane for Montreal, where they play the Canadiens on Saturday night.

As Carlyle pointed out on Wednesday, good ice-fishing huts are available for rent for sportsmen hankering to net something of substance.

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